this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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Python allows programmers to pass additional arguments to functions via comments. Now armed with this knowledge head out and spread it to all code bases.

Feel free to use the code I wrote in your projects.

Link to the source code: https://github.com/raldone01/python_lessons_py/blob/main/lesson_0_comments.ipynb

Image transcription:

from lib import add

# Go ahead and change the comments.
# See how python uses them as arguments.

result = add()  # 1 2
print(result)
result = add()  # 3 4
print(result)
result = add()  # 3 4 5 20
print(result)

Output:

3
7
32
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[–] would_be_appreciated@lemmy.ml 63 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I assume the people freaking out about how dumb python is didn't bother to read the code and have never coded in python in their life, because the behavior here is totally reasonable. Python doesn't parse comments normally, which is what you'd expect, but if you tell it to read the raw source code and then parse the raw source code for the comments specifically, of course it does.

You would never, ever accidentally do this.

...you'd also never, ever do it on purpose.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

yeah frankly this post is borderline misinformation, they specifically import a library to read comments as arguments, it's like redefining keywords in C and complaining about C being dumb

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm going to say it just is misinformation, if that's what "lib" is here.

[–] bastion@feddit.nl 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah. 'lib' isn't a standard Python library, it's the name of the abomination that this person created. Since python has quite a bit of useful introspection, they can do something like:

  • get the stack
  • find the exact call to abomination.add()
  • reparse the text of that line, turn the text of the comment into actual numbers, and add them

Now, I don't know if python keeps the comments around, so it may involve getting the filename and line number, reading the file, and manually extracting the comment text from that line.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

It's not even actually called lib. The line just straight up isn't in the image "transcribed", and it's from arglib import comment_arguments in the original code.

Yeah, I gave this one a downvote.